What if we understood the movement to rename places not as a movement to make the settler-colonial world less offensive, but to affirm the enduring presence of the world that settler-colonial place-names have historically served to obscure?
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As the edifice of fortress conservation is giving way, the renaming of Mount Doane in Yellowstone as First People’s Mountain takes on a powerful meaning.
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As the case of Lake Tanaya demonstrates, when we read place-names out of context, they often tell us very little. They sometimes even mislead us. No place-name is neutral.
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Titled “Words Are Monuments”, a new a new scientific study presents findings from a quantitative analysis of National Park place-names. Results show that derogatory place-names are only the tip of the iceberg.
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In this video interview, Lummi elder, organizer, and Master Carver Jewell James explains how place-names and language serve to structure a way of seeing and interacting in the world.
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Within a larger reflection on the logics and limitations of Western Conservation, renaming campaigns function as punctuation marks: driving forward an important conversation about the history and future of our public lands in a time of profound environmental and social change.
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If the monument removals of the past two years have taught us anything, it is that symbolic struggles shape popular consciousness, revealing the collective capacity of the people to set the coordinates through which we navigate space.
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If it’s clear that maps have been central to the twin projects of colonial dispossession and capital accumulation, can they be mobilized in the other direction, not in the interest of accumulation, surveillance, and control, but collective liberation?
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